|
Day 21 - 28 Authors, 28 Variations on a List |
|
|
|
Day 21. Chelsea Cain is the author of The New York Times bestselling thrillers Heartsick, Sweetheart, Evil at Heart, and The Night Season. Her Portland-based thrillers, described by The New York Times
as “steamy and perverse,” have been published in over 30 languages,
recommended on “The Today Show,” appeared in episodes of HBO’s “True
Blood” and ABC’s “Castle,” named among Stephen King’s top ten favorite
books of the year, and included in NPR’s list of the top 100 thrillers
ever written. Her next book, Kill You Twice, comes out in August 2012.
Cain says her favorite NW indie is Village Books in Bellingham.
“My mom had a garden nursery next door, so I pretty much grew up there,”
she says. “They let me read books without buying them. If you bought a
book at Village Books in the 1980s, it probably has my fingerprints on
it.” Read Cain’s interview with Village Books’ staffer Lindsey McGuirk here.
Here’s her list:
The Sliding Glass Door
by Scott Poole (Colonus Publishing). This is poetry for smart people
who have very dry senses of humor. My Uncle Phil is a big fan of Calvin
Trillin, another smart/funny poet. (Phil used to wear bowties,
un-ironically.) I think he will really like this book. Also, I got Scott
to autograph it, so it gives me a chance to look impressive in front of
the family when Phil opens it. “Why, yes, I do know the poet.”
Birds of Paradise
by Diana Abu-Jaber. I am giving this book to my aunt Colleen, my aunt
Patricia, and my stepmother, Susan. (Please don’t tell them that they
are all getting the same present—that would be awkward.) This book is
wonderful, really lyrical and bursting with evocative writing. I think a
lot of people think it’s going to be sad (it’s about a woman who’s
teenage daughter is missing and doesn’t want to be found), but it’s
actually life-affirming. Plus, it takes place in Miami and everyone can
use some sun this time of year, except people who actually live in
Miami.
The Chronology of Water
by Lidia Yuknavitch. Man, I love this book. I’m giving it to my cousin
Cecily, who is one of the people I love most in the world. Lidia’s
memoir is so rich with poetry and heart and beauty. I just want to read
it again and again. It makes me want to be a better writer. Shit, it
makes me want to be a better person. Plus, I wrote the introduction, so I
can self-promote while giving selflessly.
Damned
by Chuck Palahniuk. I get Chuck to sign a book for my brother-in-law
every year. Damned is the story of Madison, a precocious 13- year-old
who goes to hell. Literally. This will make a nice addition to Ryan’s CP
collection, which I’m pretty sure he uses to get girls back to his
room. “Hey, baby, want to see my Chuck Palahniuk books?” Girls love
themselves some Fight Club.
The Retribution
by Val McDermid. This is the new book in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan
thriller series from the UK. If you have read the first books in the
series, you just peed your pants a little from excitement. I have
already read the galley, but I’m totally getting the hardback for myself
to add to my collection as soon as it comes out in January. (It’s SO
GOOD. Oh. My. God.) I like to have a nice little stack of Val’s books
in the guest room for overnight guests who ask for something to read.
This ensures that they won’t do any sleeping, which makes them easier to
handle in the morning.
|
|
|
Day 20 - 28 Authors, 28 Variations on a List |
|
|
|
Day 20. The first day of Hanukkah. Scott Nadelson is the author of three story collections, most recently Aftermath.
A winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction, the Reform Judaism
Fiction Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, Nadelson
teaches creative writing at Willamette University and in the Rainier
Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. His first
book of nonfiction, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress, will be published by Hawthorne Books in 2013. His favorite indie is Broadway Books in Portland.
He writes: “I read a lot of great stuff this year, but these five
are the books that stick with me the most. You’ll notice that they’re
all collections—stories, essays, poems—which is my favorite kind of
gift: lots of small things contained in one bigger package.”
Black Cherries by
Grace Stone Coates. This was a wonderfully unexpected find. I picked it
up mostly because Bison Books, from the University of Nebraska Press,
always publishes top-notch work. I’d never heard of Grace Stone Coates,
and this book was out of print for nearly fifty years; but it turns out
that she was one of our most celebrated short story writers, with a
total of twenty stories cited in the back of the Best American Short
Stories in the 1920s and 1930s. This book contains eighteen linked
stories about a Kansas farming family. They are brief and quiet and
mysterious, and capture as well as any stories I’ve read the odd
perspective of a child looking at an adult world she only partially
understands.
The Return
by Roberto Bolaño. Like a lot of people over the past few years, since
his books have begun to be translated into English, I can’t get enough
of Bolaño, particularly his shorter works. This is the second published
collection of the Chilean master’s stories, and like the previous one,
the amazing Last Evenings on Earth, these stories are strange
and haunting. But they’re also often funny as well, full of a
mischievous wit that critics don’t often give Bolaño credit for. What I
love about his work above all is that even the most seemingly casual,
off-hand tale takes us to unexpected places, to the dark center of his
characters’ fears and desires.
The Late Interiors
by Marjorie Sandor. Not only is Marjorie a former teacher and a dear
friend, but she’s also one of the best writers in the Northwest. Her
latest book is a memoir made of smaller fragments—essays, lyrical
meditations, journal entries—that cover five seasons during a
transitional time in her life. The book is about a house, a garden, an
illness, a legal battle with a neighboring institution, but above all
it’s about the creative process, the way one constructs a life out of
the messy raw material of daily existence. It’s also, sentence by
sentence, the most beautiful thing I read all year.
The Professor
by Terry Castle. Castle is a rare breed, a literary critic who turns
the sharp lens of her scrutiny to include herself in the wide scope of
her cultural investigations. These essays are a personal journey into
the world of art, literature, and music, and what makes them most
exciting is Castle’s exuberant, irreverent voice. Some of them are
laugh-out-loud funny, including one that features a dinner party at
Susan Sontag’s apartment. Others are devastating; my favorite essay in
the collection, “My Heroin Christmas,” is an exploration of the life and
work of the jazz great Art Pepper and his connection to Castle’s
challenging California childhood.
Requiem for the Orchard by
Oliver de la Paz. I don’t read as much poetry as I used to—not nearly
as much as I’d like—but this collection really knocked me out. De la Paz
is another Northwest writer; he grew up in Ontario, Oregon, and the
poems in this collection explore his native landscape in the voice of a
speaker caught between hating the hometown he’s escaped and mourning its
loss. The poems are elegant elegies to childhood, to former selves, to a
changing world. Their images are so vivid they stick in your mind weeks
after you’ve put the book down. It’s a testament to a poet’s skill when
he can turn teenagers cruising small town streets into the most
unusual, evocative ritual you’ve ever encountered.
|
|
|
Day 19 - 28 Authors, 28 Variations on a List |
|
|
|
Our Day 19 author divides her time between teaching at Portland State University and writing in Miami. Though her new novel, Birds of Paradise, is based in Miami, everyone in the novel is dreaming about or trying to move to Portland. Birds of Paradise was included on year-end best lists this year in the Washington Post
and on NPR and is on the short list for a Pacific Northwest Book Award
from the indie booksellers of the Northwest. Diana Abu-Jaber won a PNBA
Award in 2006 for her memoir The Language of Baklava.
Listen to Abu-Jaber read an essay about her family’s tradition of hosting guests and feasting during the holidays. She’s also one of 17 contributors to Blue Christmas: Holiday Stories for the Rest of Us: An Anthology with a story called “American Sweater.”
Speaking of sweaters, she sent us this photo while admitting that
she thinks it’s “the most embarrassing photograph of me in known
existence.” She says she and her husband and a couple of friends were
celebrating Christmas in South Florida and she thought everyone was
going to wear a Christmas sweater. “Also, that bow is NOT tied in my
hair,” she says. “However, I think the photographer was having a good
ol’ crack-up at my expense.”
Abu-Jaber says she has many favorite bookstores in the Northwest,
but she has a special place in her heart for Annie Bloom’s, which was
her neighborhood bookstore when she lived in Multnomah Village. “They
put on amazing events and there’s such a special environment,” she says.
“It’s a real home-place.”
Here’s her list:
Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout. There is a wonderful synergistic effect to this
novel-in-pieces: a cosmology through which a character is glimpsed in
fragments. Olive is lumbering and uncomfortable and captivating, all at
once, an unforgettable character in her community.
Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann. A stirring, affecting novel that travels, spans
countries, gives off sparks: a series of unlikely love stories wrapped
around intertwined lives.
Widow
by Michelle Latiolais. There is a still, almost glass-like quality to
this writing: exquisitely-told, deeply felt stories on and around the
experience of loss. Deeply painful at time, sweet and almost comedic at
others, but always powerfully affecting.
Super Sad True Love Story
by Gary Shteyngart. I’m not sure there’s anything I can say about this
dystopian satire that hasn’t already been said: It’s crazy and risky and
awful and addictive. The language, the voice, the characters, the
scene—this terrifying future scenario is written brilliantly close to
the bone.
How I Became A Famous Novelist
by Steve Hely. A sharp-eyed send-up of the writing industry that
follows a disillusioned young man as he makes his calculating entry into
bestsellerdom. It’s the sort of brave yet hilarious book that has a
writer laughing through her tears.
|
|
|
Day 18 - 28 Authors, 28 Variations on a List |
|
|
|
Day
18 brings us another of our favorite hometown authors and yet another
engaging list that we couldn’t get through on a first read because we
had to stop and scribble her gift ideas on our personal lists. Cecelia
Hagen’s most recent collection of poetry is Entering, which was published this fall by Airlie Press, a nonprofit poetry collective based in Oregon. We loved what she had to say about it here. Hagen is the author of two previous chapbooks, Fringe Living and Among Others.
She teaches memoir and poetry writing in Eugene, where she and her
husband do most of their tango dancing. Her favorite local indie is Tsunami Bookstore in Eugene. She’s also fond of The Literary Duck, which she says will always be “the bookstore” to her.
Here’s her list:
My favorite book to give is Reynolds Price’s first novel, A Long and Happy Life.
The title alone makes it irresistible—who wouldn’t want to give such a
thing? Price’s prose is dreamy, languid, and suited to the tale, a love
story set in North Carolina in the 1950s. The first sentence, which is
nearly a page long, describes Rosacoke Mustian riding on the back of
Wesley Beavers’ motorcycle as he takes her to a funeral. Price died last
January, and it’s fortunate that he left us so many wonderful books to
read.
Last year I gave my son Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat.
I felt a little guilty about it, thinking I was just giving it to him
so that I could borrow it back. Song lyrics have a lot in common with
poems, and Sondheim’s gossipy insights and observations are like candy,
and he’s as hard on himself as he is on anyone else, bemoaning an easy
rhyme or a bad word choice. This year, Sondheim has a second volume—Look, I Made a Hat—and my son has made it clear he’d like it, too. Nothing like keeping it in the family!
I’m getting The Meaning of Tango: The Story of the Argentinian Dance
by Christine Denniston for my husband, who is my favorite tango
partner. It’s a handsome-looking book that explores the history and
meaning of the dance, and contains what I consider appropriate technical
insights, such as: “The leader must carry the follower’s heart through
each step of the turning walk, just as the leader carries the follower’s
heart through every other step in the Tango. The two hearts must stay
together all the time.”
For a friend who likes to read poetry but doesn’t feel she knows
enough to buy it herself, I’m getting a book of Tomas Transtromer’s
poems. Transtromer won the Nobel prize in literature this year. The
ultra-cool independent press Tavern Books, run by two poets (Mike
McGriff and Carl Adamshick), will re-release John F. Deane’s translation of Transtromer’s For the Living and the Dead in January. Transtromer’s world view is haunted, but humane. I think she’ll like it.
I learned about my next pick from the Independent Northwest holiday books catalog—honest, I did! As soon as I read about Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees,
I felt it would be a perfect gift for my son-in-law, and one that I
could maybe gaze at for a while before I wrapped it. The amazing
photographs splay out against a white background. It’s easy to get lost
in them! And the author, Nancy Hugo, writes with engaging familiarity
about her subject.
Speaking of familiarity with your subject, Evelyn Searle Hess’s To the Woods: Sinking Roots, Living Lightly, and Finding True Home is a memoir that I keep
buying and giving. Hess has an amazing tale to tell here, but the most
amazing thing is her depiction of nature, and her ongoing quest to find a
way to preserve it, and promote it, and enjoy it year-round, in all its
guises and glory.
My last pick is a book suitable for anyone: Jan Elliott’s newest Stone Soup collection, Brace Yourself.
I’ll give this to my granddaughter—who’s a big fan of the strip–hoping
she’ll grow up to have a little bit of the wisdom and humor that Jan’s
fine characters exhibit, and the tolerance they ultimately have for one
another. But of course I’ll enjoy it for myself first, and then enjoy it
all over again when Clio reads her favorite strips to me.
18share0shareNew
|
|
|